I'm after your thoughts on what might be the outcome of this situation:

A friend registered a Sole Proprieter business in June 2007 and received the EntrePass in December. Neither have been renewed, so the business registration expired in June 2008 and the EP expires tomorrow. She simply forgot that these two things needed renewing at the appropriate times.

Annual income from her business is SGD 20-30k. There are no expenses. She has not recorded all the money received, nor did she issue receipts for all services rendered. She is not able to determine the exact amount of money made in order to submit the details to the authorities. Subsequently, no financial information was submitted for year 2007 or yet for 2008.

So, now she's been running her business unregistered for almost 6 months, and tomorrow her EP expires. She plans to go directly to MOM tomorrow, then to the IRAS but is extremely worried about what might happen - fines, audits, jail...

This situation my friend finds herself in is completely down to her ignorance and inexperience.

Jords wrote:I'm after your thoughts on what might be the outcome of this situation:

A friend registered a Sole Proprieter business in June 2007 and received the EntrePass in December. Neither have been renewed, so the business registration expired in June 2008 and the EP expires tomorrow. She simply forgot that these two things needed renewing at the appropriate times.

Annual income from her business is SGD 20-30k. There are no expenses. She has not recorded all the money received, nor did she issue receipts for all services rendered. She is not able to determine the exact amount of money made in order to submit the details to the authorities. Subsequently, no financial information was submitted for year 2007 or yet for 2008.

So, now she's been running her business unregistered for almost 6 months, and tomorrow her EP expires. She plans to go directly to MOM tomorrow, then to the IRAS but is extremely worried about what might happen - fines, audits, jail...

This situation my friend finds herself in is completely down to her ignorance and inexperience.

Any advice or thoughts on what will happen is appreciated.

Something is fishy here. Did she just ignore her EP renewal form? It is hard to 'forget' when you get notice. It would have been emailed with plenty of time to fill it out and return. You may be able to re-apply late or you may simply be required to leave the country for failure to follow the rules. I would guess the latter because of the other things not done.

She should have also received notice to renew the sole proprietorship, which again she would have had to ignore. Failure to renew:

"To carry on business after the expiry date is an offence for which the defaulter is liable, on conviction, to a fine not exceeding $5,000, or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months, or both."

If you have done no books, then that also means you have failed to file a tax return. This will cost you, certainly the taxes owed as well as penalties. Again, you would have received notices from IRAS for both the business and personal tax filings, which again must have been ignored.

She (definitely NOT 'I') moved house and did not inform authorities of the new address; so no reminders were received. How she could not have done this or thought about it subsequently, is beyond me...

Today the she cancelled her EP & business at MOM and they gave her 2 weeks to leave the country.

Well, if there are no receipts, no tax claims and so on, then maybe, just maybe, it was all a hallucination on your friend's part and there was no business activity at all. Which means she can just submit a "$0 revenue, $0 expenses, $0 profit" filing to IRAS and close down the company.

Of course, this would be illegal if she actually did earn some money from her business, so I'm just sayin'...